Venture is right at the reception when you enter the building that houses Apple Audio Labs and you’ll come across a ton of vintage stereo settings. The deck and carry-on speakers are a gift from Steve Jobs to the team of engineers working in this office. The group sees old-fashioned technology as a source of inspiration, but also reminds of Jobs’ obsession with music and sound.
However, stereo is not just inspiration, it also reminds the importance of the sound of software, acoustics and sound design experts to everything Apple has built.
Inside, I was taken to an inconspicuous hall in the maze, from one room to another, with three Apple engineers as my guide. I have a rare peek at the company’s product development facilities – one step behind the scenes, more than usually allowed At Apple Event.
Verify AirPods Listening Test
When Apple’s audio team worked to correct and calibrate the fit of AirPods that fit the ear geometric changes, they used a collection of audio metric stalls to check their work. These rooms look like small, windowless offices. The walls are covered with sound damping panels, there is a workstation with a Mac and various listening analysis tools. If you remember, one of the company’s main ambitions for Airpods is end-to-end hearing health experience First debut last year. To validate its claim on “clinical-grade hearing tests,” engineers use devices you might see in an audiologist’s office, such as an audiometer. These spaces are not different from the small booths you might be sitting in professionally managed hearing tests.
In just one booth, the team conducted thousands of tests on the feature to ensure Hearing screening in your pocket As accurate as you get from a doctor. Not only does this allow AirPods users to build hearing aids at home (if needed), but it also creates an accurate hearing aid so that you can hear the music the way you expect.
Another important step in the product design process is to make sure everyone uses AirPods to listen to music. Everyone hears various frequencies in different ways, so adjustments need to be made to achieve the desired consistency. Through hearing tests and the included audio profile, Apple then has a starting point to make both technical and artistic decisions. Here, technical and liberal arts expertise in the audio lab team began to blend.
When your office is a tuning studio
Media Tuning Lab can reproduce recorded audio on any product made by Apple, including iPhone, Mac and iPad. To bridge the gap between the pursuit of art and science, the team comes from a variety of backgrounds – from live concerts to Broadway sound design and even traditional acoustic engineering. Various tuning studios in the area are built like music creation rooms: a complete mini studio surrounded by various instruments, the main seats to listen in the back, and a table on the table, replacing the soundboards of the recording engineer. As a great touch, they are all named after famous recording studios such as Abbey Road.
The main idea is to adjust the team needs to refer to what the recorded content sounds when it is created. This, in turn, better understand the artist’s intentions and then applies it to airpods pro 3. With Ear Tips’ seals combined with computational audio inside Apple’s latest earbud model, tuning engineers believe these AirPods provide the most realistic sound in the company’s lineup, as the team is able to reduce a lot of changes in various users and fits.
To create an exciting sound profile, and still keep all the authenticity, the Media Tuning Team listened to thousands of hours of music, movies, podcasts and YouTube videos in Mono, Stereo and Dolby Atmos. These tuning studios also have a lot of vinyl lining on the shelves. During the development process, the team will use compute audio to test multiple versions of the hardware. The goal is that all adjustment decisions can be better translated to all users and hope everyone hears the same voice in Apple products.
In addition to listening to music through speakers and headphones, the microphone is also important for tuning. To create features like Studio-quality recording on AirPods Pro, the team captured the clips from the studio’s earbuds and the real world, and then compared them to the benchmarks of high-end recording microphones. This analysis allows engineers to translate parental audio features for consumer products such as AirPods. For example, studio-quality audio replaces Lavalier with iPhone video earbuds. Obviously, it will never replace studio microphones, but it does have more capable audio tools in your pocket.
A completely silent room
An important part of testing Apple Audio products and features like Space Audio is using them in a completely silent room. It is called an acrobatic room, and is a room in a room separated from the rest of the building. This is essential because footsteps in the hall or riding in a car driving outside will produce vibrating noises that will otherwise propagate into the chamber.
Inside, foam wedges on the walls, floors and ceilings absorb all the sounds made in the space. There is no echo (hence the name “Anechoic”), so the sound and clapping are dead. In fact, you have to walk on a suspended grid that looks like an electric fence, because the real “floor” of the room is more foam wedges designed to absorb sound reflections from below. It’s a repulsive space because it looks like something from a science fiction movie – not to mention the lack of reverb.
In decades Apple has been designing and manufacturing electronics, the company has learned a lot about unnecessary noise from devices. The Anechoic room allows a dedicated team of acoustic engineers to listen very carefully to products like AirPods to determine if there is any sound. They work with other engineering teams to make sure that the product does not do anything the company is not going to do.
The silent room is also an important part of spatial audio development. In the current configuration, there is a chair in the room with a circle of small speakers around it. Engineers studied the variable physiology of the subjects, such as the way sounds bounce from the inside of the human body and ears. Then, to generate perception of sound from a specific direction, the team uses computational audio and signal processing to create an ideal angle for a person’s hearing signature. This analysis is directly responsible for Personalized spatial audioit can scan from iPhone cameras and analyze them using various models and algorithms to adjust everyone’s voice.
Fantasia Lab: Verification of ANC, Transparency Mode and Spatial Audio
The last stop of my tour was the most engaging visual and sound. The room is called Fantasia Labs, named after the first movie that uses surround sound. The name also indicates the ability of Apple engineers to produce (or simulate) any sound in the room’s spherical speaker settings. The Audio Lab team used this room to verify features on the AirPods Pro 3, including transparency mode, active noise cancellation (ANC), and spatial audio.
Arrays of dozens of speakers allow engineers to evaluate whether ambient sound in transparency mode is as accurate and natural as possible. The team will have someone sitting inside the sphere and point out which direction they are coming from to eliminate any issues with the feature. To measure the performance of ANC, various types of sounds are input. This gives engineers insight into how the algorithm works, used to ensure that ANC steadily and effectively blocks as much noise as possible. For spatial audio, the team will play sound at different locations and angles of the actual speakers before trying to recreate the view of sound from the same location inside the Airpods.
I was able to sit down for a few seconds to understand the capabilities of Fantasia Labs. One of the engineers performed a live recording of a concert in space audio. Among the speakers around me, the voices come from all directions – including the roar of the crowd. I closed my eyes, there, resonated with Omar Apollo. Except, of course I am not. I was surrounded by speakers in a small room, and a corridor maze of four others, hidden in a number of buildings around Apple.
Imagine my disappointment when I opened my eyes.
